McClintock's Essay

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Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction

Robbie McClintock

Institute for Learning Technologies
Teachers College — Columbia University
December 2000


 

Section 3 — Trivial Teachers
¶ 35
 		 Bluntly put, in the world of study that existed until modern times, teaching was trivial; that is, teaching was trivial in the rigorous sense: it pertained primarily to the trivium, to regulating a student's elementary exercises in grammar, logic, and rhetoric. 
 
¶ 36
 		 Trivial teachers had the self-effacing mission of making themselves unnecessary. The young needed help and discipline in working their way through the first steps of study, in acquiring the basic tools without which all else would be arcane. The teacher, the master of exercises, gave indispensable aid in making that acquisition; but as soon as it was made the student would give up studying the elementary arts and go on to more important matters. Reliance on the brute discipline doled out by the master of exercises was demeaning, and numerous sources show how men believed it to be important to get done with the arts, to end dependence on magisterial instruction so that one could begin to study freely, as curiosity dictated, and so that one could do it with dignity, without the humiliating discipline of the master of exercises.
 
¶ 37
 		 For instance, Seneca derided those who took pride in being occupied with the liberal studies; one should work instead to be done with them, for no good came of them themselves; rather, they served simply as a preparation for the truly serious matter of self-formation. [ 25 ] The same valuation can be found in Augustine's remark that, even though he was able to master the liberal arts without the aid of a teacher, he found little value in them per se. [ 26 ] In the Middle Ages John of Salisbury explicitly stated the self-effacing mission of the teacher when he answered the question why some arts were called liberal by observing that "those to whom the system of the Trivium has disclosed the significance of all words, or the rules of the Quadrivium have unveiled the secrets of all nature, do not need the help of a teacher in order to understand the meaning of books and to find the solutions of questions." [ 27 ] This same desire to end one's dependence on one's teachers was implicit in the way the Renaissance educator, Batista Guarino, recommended his course of studies: "a master who should carry his scholars through the curriculum which I have now laid down may have confidence that he has given them a training which will enable them, not only to carry forward their own reading without assistance, but also to act efficiently as teachers in their turn." [ 28 ] To a remarkable degree the trivial teachers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance agreed with Plato that their job was not "to put knowledge into a soul which does not possess it"; rather, they simply directed, disciplined, and exercised the inborn organ of learning possessed by every man.
 
¶ 38
 		 As a consequence of this view, educational theorists in the world of study had no difficulty denoting as potential or actual educators all sorts of people who made no claim to imparting knowledge, for these theorists saw that it was not only the schoolmaster who put a man's capacity for learning through a constructive or destructive sequence of exercise. If we were to pursue this observation to the full richness of its implications, we would have to witness the medieval morality plays, study the doctrines of virtues and vices, and follow how they were used to explain the degradation and the elevation of character in works such as Dante's Divine Comedy. [ 29 ]
 
¶ 39
 		 But by understanding the teacher as a master of exercises, and not as an imparter of knowledge, old-time theorists were also able to identify a most varied group of potential educators in a more narrow sense. Thus, a number of books called "the schoolmaster" were intended only in part to be used by masters of actual schools; in the other part, the authors were using the schoolmaster as a literary device for explaining the sequence of exercises for those who would oversee students who were to labor on the elementary matters at home or in the apprentice shop. For instance, Roger Ascham did not write The Schoolmaster only to improve classroom practices; his book was "specially purposed for the private bringing up of youth in gentlemen and noble men's houses, and commodious also for all such, as have forgot the Latin tongue, and would by themselves, without a schoolmaster, in short time, and with small pains, recover a sufficient hability, to understand, write, and speak Latin." [ 30 ] Edmund Coote soon extended this genre to a more popular audience with The English Schoolmaster, which was specially purposed for providing the hard-working artisan with a vernacular tool of self-instruction. [ 31 ]
 
¶ 40
 		 As a result of this flexibility, which inhered in the triviality of teaching, schooling keyed to study — schooling based on a system of exercises, not on the impartation of knowledge — could be found occurring most anywhere, for most anyone could regulate the regimen. This fact made possible what Lawrence A. Cremin has found for the seventeenth-century American colonies, namely "that schooling went on anywhere and everywhere, not only in schoolrooms, but in kitchens, manses, churches, meetinghouses, sheds erected in fields, and shops erected in towns; that pupils were taught by anyone and everyone, not only by schoolmasters, but by parents, tutors, clergymen, lay readers, precentors, physicians, lawyers, artisans, and shopkeepers; and that most teaching proceeded on an individual basis, so that whatever lines there were in the metropolis between petty schooling and grammar schooling were virtually absent in the colonies: the content and sequence of learning [study] remained fairly well defined, and each student progressed from textbook to textbook at his own pace." [ 32 ]
 
¶ 41
 		 What was well defined, it is important to remember, was not learning. but "learnyng," getting one's basic linguistic skills through a regulated process of study. Old-time books that addressed the schoolmaster concerned the art of "keeping school," and they show how deeply "teachyng" designed to regulate "learnyng" was pervaded by respect for study. Such a work is the Ratio Studiorum of the Jesuits, which set forth a detailed regimen for conducting schools, higher and lower. Its precepts had been derived from a careful study of successful practices as these had developed in the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, and back even to Quintilian and before; and its precepts were to guide the conduct, not only of the many schools the Jesuits founded, but numerous others, Catholic, Protestant, and even secular. [ 33 ] Precocious self-starters like Montaigne would repeatedly find these schools to be confining, a check on their power to study; but despite the occasional operative shortcoming, clearly their rationale was the conviction that the students' business was to study: thus Montaigne's teacher could connive with the boy's independent tastes.
 
¶ 42
 		 Few innovations are to be found in the Ratio; it described conventional practice with simplicity and clarity; it specified the duties of all without demeaning the intelligence of any. The system of education that the Ratio laid down did not function through a process of teaching and learning; its motive force was study, :a word that recurs over and over in the text. The duty of students was to "resolve to apply their minds seriously and constantly to their studies. . . ," and the function of the faculty, from the rector through the professors down to the lowly beadle, was to regulate, modulate, sustain, correct, and stimulate the students' studies. [ 34 ] Consequently, although the Ratio said almost nothing about methods of classroom instruction, of imparting knowledge, it precisely described the programs of disputations, declamations, and other exercises by means of which the faculty could oversee the pupils' progress.
 
¶ 43
 		 Only the professors of the lower classes were explicitly charged with a responsibility to instruct their students: here again one encounters the old-time triviality of teaching. [ 35 ] For the most part, however, regardless of level, the professor's purpose was hortatory and heuristic, rather than didactic: "to move his hearers, both within class and out, as opportunity offers, to a reverence and love of God and of the virtues which are pleasing in His sight, and to pursue all their studies to that end." [ 36 ] In the Jesuit system, and in most systems of education well into the Enlightenment, the moving force was the student, and the teacher's function was not to instruct, but to incite, discipline, and modulate that youthful energy.
 
¶ 44
 		 Here. however, we begin to touch on the historic frailty of equating education with a process of study. As passionate causes wracked human affairs, as they have done from the Reformation onward, men found it hard to maintain restraint; they ceased to be willing merely to help in the self-development of their fellows; they discovered themselves burdened, alas, with paternal responsibility for ensuring that their wards would not falter and miss the mark. Thus the methodological restraint, the respect for study, that characterized the Jesuit Ratio did not fully accord with the historic mission of that order, and in practice, over a period of time, its educational methods became less heuristic, more didactic, some would even say rather Jesuitical. [ 37 ] Pressures — religious, political, social, economic, humanitarian pressures — began to mount upon the schools, and it soon became a mere matter of time before schools would be held accountable for the people they produced.
 
¶ 45
 		 Signs of transition were frequent during the seventeenth century. An educational lodestone such as Samuel Hartlib drew to himself traditional theorists of the process of study and visionary proponents of our present-day process of teaching and learning. In "Of Education," a letter solicited by Hartlib, John Milton suggested a few innovations in the traditional scholastic program, but those notwithstanding, his views conventionally concerned the ends and methods of study. He prescribed a taxing but familiar circle of studies, and he explained, not how these should be taught, but how the student should work his way through them. Like the Jesuits, the great Puritan assigned the teacher a hortatory, not a didactic task: to incite the students with a passion for study, "to temper them [with] such lectures and explanations, upon every opportunity, as may lead and draw them in willing obedience, inflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue; stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages." [ 38 ] The pressures mounting on the educator to produce stellar students are here reflected in Milton's rhetoric; but his system still assigned initiative, not to the teacher, but to the student: "these are the studies wherein our noble and gentle youth ought to bestow their time, in a disciplinary way, from twelve to one and twenty." [ 39 ]
 
¶ 46
 		 Hartlib must have winced at Milton's derisive reference to Comenius — "to search what many modern Januas and Didactics, more than ever I shall read, have projected, my inclination leads me not" — for Comenius had first fired Hartlib's pedagogical interest and was then the fashionable fascination of the educational avant-garde. And Comenius — curious Comenius! — best represents the other tendency of the time, the new tendency to create a world of instruction, to respond to the growing pressures with a visionary program, a still visionary program, in which universal schooling would be the cause of universal peace. Ah! To the lecterns, heroic pedagogues! Your hour is come. The future is yours to make. Hear and heed the noble call: — The Great Didactic Setting forth the whole Art of Teaching all Things to all Men, or A certain Inducement to found such Schools in all the Parishes, Towns, and Villages of every Christian Kingdom, that the entire Youth of both Sexes, none being excepted, shall Quickly, Pleasantly, and Thoroughly Become learned in the Sciences, pure in Morals, trained to Piety, and in this manner instructed in all things necessary for the present and for the future life. . . .
 
¶ 47
 		 Comenius cared naught for study; teaching and learning were his thing. He said little about the sequence of exercises to be performed by students in acquiring the elementary arts, but instead set forth the techniques and principles by means of which teachers were to impart knowledge, virtue, and faith to empty minds "with such certainty that the desired result must of necessity follow." [ 42 ] Teaching ceased to be trivial; it became essential, it became the desideratum, the arbiter of worth, the very source of man's humanity. "He gave no bad definition who said that man was a 'teachable animal.' And indeed it is only by proper education that he can become a man.... We see then that all who are born to man's estate have need of instruction, since it is necessary that, being men, they should not be wild beasts, savage brutes, or inert logs. It follows also that one man excels another in exact proportion as he has received more instruction." [ 43 ] Here is the basis for our cult of the degree; and Comenius' faith in the power of the school had no bounds: he even suggested that had there been a better school in Paradise, Eve would not have made her sore mistake, for she "would have known that the serpent is unable to speak, and that there must therefore be some deceit." [ 44 ]
 
¶ 48
 		 In his time, Comenius was a futile visionary. There is much in his thought that his later disciples would not care to follow. In lieu of reasoned argument, Comenius frequently relied on rather forced renderings of Biblical precedent. He was a spokesman for neither classical humanism nor the budding tradition of inductive and deductive science; he was content to reason by analogy, no matter how strained, and his thought was influenced by the hermetic tradition and by exotic Renaissance memory systems. [ 45 ] Yet sharp judgments are often garbed with bizarre accouterments, and Comenius shrewdly perceived the pedagogical future. All the basic concerns of modern Western education were adumbrated in The Great Didactic: there was to be universal, compulsory, extended instruction for both boys and girls in efficient, well-run schools in which teachers, who had been duly trained in a "Didactic College," were to be responsible for teaching sciences, arts, languages, morals, and piety by following an exact order derived from nature and by using tested, efficacious principles. This outline has been given fleshly substance; initiative has everywhere been thoroughly shifted from the student to the teacher; a world of instruction has completely displaced the bygone world of study. 
 
¶ 49
 		 Signs abound of how teaching has won precedence from study. Rarely does one hear that study is the raison d'être of an educational institution; teaching and learning is now what it is all about, and with this change, has come a change in the meaning of the venerable word "learning." Once it described what a man acquired as a result of serious study, but now it signifies what one receives as a result of good teaching. The psychology of learning is an important topic in educational research, not because it will help students improve their habits of study, but because it enables instructors to devise better strategies of teaching. Recall how the Ratio Studiorum, a teacher's handbook, was all about the regimen of study, and then compare it to The Teacher's Handbook, edited by Dwight W. Allen and Eli Seifman. Of its seventy-five chapters, none deal with study, although dependably, the section on "The Instructional Process" opens with chapters on "The Teaching Process" and its responsive correlate "The Learning Process." [ 46 ]
 
¶ 50
 		 Interest in study has largely disappeared. Consult the profile of current educational research: whereas the 1969 ERIC catalogue lists a meager thirty-eight entries for all topics concerning study, it has 277 entries for Teaching Methods alone. and hundreds and hundreds more for other aspects of that sacred occupation. [ 47 ] Furthermore, in the same way that the meaning of "learning" has changed, so has that of "study." It has ceased to be a self-directed motivating force, which to be sure, may have needed a master of exercises to help sustain it through the dull preliminaries. No longer the source, study itself has become a consequence of instruction, or such is the premise of those inevitable treatises that expertly explain how to teach pupils how to study. In these, study no longer depends on the student's initiative; no — study, according to a dissertation on The Problem of Teaching High School Pupils How to Study, "is a pupil activity of the type required to satisfy the philosophy of education held by the teacher." [ 48 ] Ah yes; man is a teachable animal — animal docilis.
 
 
 

 

 

Endnotes
Note 25 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, op. cit., n. 3, Letter LXXXVIII, Vol. II, pp. 349-377. [Back]
Note 26 Augustine. Confessions, op. cit., n. 23, pp. 55-6. [Back]
Note 27 John of Salisbury. The Metalogicon: A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium, trans. Daniel D. McGarry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962, p. 36. [Back]
Note 28 Battista Guarino, "De Ordine Docendi et Studenti," in William Harrison Woodward. Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators. New York: Teachers College Press, 1963, p. 172. [Back]
Note 29 See Sandro Sticca. The Latin Passion Play: Its Origin and Development. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970; Adolf Katzenellenbogen. Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art, trans. Alan J. p. Crick. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1964; Emile Mâle. The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Dora Nussey. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958; Dante Alighiere. The Divine Comedy, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. 3 volumes. Baltimore: Penquin Books, 1949 ff.; and for a coming together of many of these strands, see Peter Brieger, Millard Meiss, and Charles S. Singleton. Illuminated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. A fascinating book could be written on character formation in the Middle Ages. [Back]
Note 30 Roger Ascham, from the full title of The Schoolmaster, in Ascham. English Works. W.A. Wright, ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1903, p. 171. [Back]
Note 31 See the brief analysis of The English Schoolmaster in Philippe Aries. Centuries of Childhood A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick. New York: Vintage Books, 1962, pp. 298-9. [Back]
Note 32 Lawrence A. Cremin. American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783. New York: Harper and Row, 1970, pp. 192-3. [Back]
Note 33 For a good discussion of pedagogical method in the various seventeenth-century colleges, see George Snyders. La Pédagogie en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965. [Back]
Note 34 Edward A. Fitzpatrick, ed. St. Ignatius and the Ratio Studiorum. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1933, includes a translation of the 1599 version of the Ratio by A. R. Ball. For the quotation, see p. 234, for the duties of the faculty, pp. 137-234 passim. [Back]
Note 35 Ibid., p. 195: "Let the master so instruct the boys who are entrusted to the discipline of our Society, that they will thoroughly learn, along with their letters, the habits worthy of Christians." Aside from this brief mention of instruction, the incessant theme is study. [Back]
Note 36 Ibid., p. 150. [Back]
Note 37 For an unsympathetic depiction of later Jesuit education by an excellent Spanish novelist, see Ramón Pérez de Ayala. A.M.D.G.: La vida en un colegio de Jesuitas in Obras completas. Vol. 4. Madrid: Editorial Pueyo, 1931. For an example of the moralizing that penetrated the colleges, albeit not a Jesuit example, read the little book, specially printed for the winners of schoolboy prizes by M. L'Abbe Proyard. L'Ecolier Vertueux ou vie édifiante d'un écolier de l'université de Paris, 6th ed. Paris: Audot et Compagnie, 1810. [Back]
Note 38 Milton, "Of Education," F. A. Patterson, ed. The Student's Milton. New York: F. S. Crofts and Co., 1930, p. 728. [Back]
Note 39 Ibid., p. 729. [Back]
Note 40 Ibid., p. 724. [Back]
Note 41 From the title, The Great Didactic, trans. M. W. Keating. New York: Russell and Russell, 1967. [Back]
Note 42 Ibid., p. 111. In the whole book, a bit over 300 pages long, there is one brief mention of study, per se, with respect to the university, which was to operate on a very high level with only very selected students; Ibid., pp. 281-4. With this exception, instruction, teaching, and learning was Comenius' incessant theme. [Back]
Note 43 Ibid., pp. 52 and 56. [Back]
Note 44 Ibid., p. 54. [Back]
Note 45 Frances A. Yates in The Art of Memory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966, pp. 377-8, draws this connection. It is developed more fully by Maria Teresa Gentile in her fascinating book Immagine e parola nella formazione dell'uomo. Rome: Armando Editore, 1965, pp. 286-319. Comenius' place in the pansophic and encyclopedic movement is examined well by Eugenio Garin. L'educazione in Europa, 1400-1600, 2nd ed. Bari: Editori Laterza, 1966. [Back]
Note 46 See the table of contents, Dwight W. Allen and Eli Seifman, eds. The Teacher's Handbook. Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1971. On the change in the meaning of "learning" see the Oxford English Dictionary where the first meaning of to learn, generally meaning to acquire knowledge, emphasizes acquisition through study and experience more than through teaching and has generally older examples. The second meaning, emphasizing to receive instruction, is newer and has particularly clear examples from the late 1700s on. [Back]
Note 47 The sub-headings under "study" show that a good part of the 38 do not really concern study in its traditional senses: Study Abroad-2, Study Centers-6, Study Facilities-1, Study Guides-15, Study Habits-5, Study Skills-9. [Back]
Note 48 Joseph Seibert Butterweck. The Problem of Teaching High School Pupils How to Study. New York: Teachers College Bureau of Publications, 1926, p. 2; C.A. Mace. The Psychology of Study. Baltimore: Penquin Books, 1968, is somewhat of an exception in that it is written directly for the student, and it only in part, the lesser part, advises on how to learn simply what the teacher tries to teach; the better part concerns how to study on one's own motivation. [Back]